Word: melodrama
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HARLEM NIGHTS. Making his directing debut, Eddie Murphy can't seem to decide whether to go for laughs or melodrama. His movie about the great Harlem nightclubs that flourished in the '30s generates a lot of foul-mouthed noise but only fitful, murky light...
...they achieve an emotional bond -- a standard for hospital melodrama -- but in reveries rather than everyday contact. The patient becomes a stand-in for the nurse's dead mother; the nurse is transformed into the patient's long-lost sister, then an estranged daughter. The little dramas of hospital routine thus become freighted with the burdens of decades. Trivial exchanges achieve the dimensions of catharsis. Puig deftly interweaves other themes, including the oppression of all women under Latin machismo and the extent to which South Americans may still defensively see theirs as a colonial culture...
...narrative Murphy develops out of this situation is less a homage to a vanished genre than a knock-off of two more recent successes -- The Sting and Prizzi's Honor -- that were funny, but in antithetical, unblendable ways. The movie veers uneasily from not-funny comedy to not-persuasive melodrama. Murphy forgets that the dialogue in old- fashioned crime pictures was as highly stylized as the settings. In place of sharply polished wisecracks, he gives us the steady mutter of the witless, unfelt obscenities that are the argot of our modern mean streets...
...generation he was Heathcliff and Hamlet; for another, the wily granddad of movie melodrama. And for the ages this prodigious, protean figure was our century's greatest actor...
...hairdo looks like a samurai of probity. Jack is an indiscretion waiting to happen. He has so little furtive pleasure to gain, and so much reputation to put at risk, that his dalliance has the lurid fatalism of a soap opera. Then Christine snitches to the press, and domestic melodrama stokes national tragedy...